HP DM3T battery life well short of 10 hours?

I tried a search, didnt come up with anything.

I have the following set-up on my DM3T that is getting 4.5-5 hours of battery life at a maximum with light use, ie: lowest screen brightness, wifi off, word processing. I am not running any background programs (anti-virus) or anything else that is resource intensive.

SU4100 1.3ghz 2MB L2 cache
4gb DDR3 ram
320gb 5400rpm HD


Why am I getting less than 5 hours of battery life on a unit with low specs that is supposed to get "up to" 10 hours?? Is this consistent with what everyone else is getting? Battery bar currently says that my battery's 'full lifetime' is 4:58. I just returned an Acer timeline that had the same processor and 3gb of ram instead of 4, and that thing was getting 8-10 hours easily.

Suggestions/comments please!
Thanks!

 

Which GPU do you have?

 

X4500MHD and NVDIA G105M... I'll tell u why you'r not getting 10 hour battery life.

1. Its a gimmick most of the time.. Unless u have a large 12 cell battery which u have to buy seperately and costs $100++ , keep wi fi off, low brightness and then u'll get more than 10 hours.
2. Also u'll have to use 4500MHD...

So clearly u've been scammed in a way... anyway , 5 hours isn't too bad... my Dv5 lasts for an hour if i'm lucky...

 

Every SU7300/4500GMA DM3 I have seen has easily surpassed 7 hours while web surfing.

 

I have the X4500 MHD. I just dont understand it. I was not expecting to get 10 hours, but thought I could get 6+ with the settings I am using. If SU7300's are getting 7+ I think my SU4100 should too.

grrrr

 

It does not make any sense. Maybe you got a defective battery? Download BatteryMon from Passmark and make sure it isn't bad.

 

I think something is defective, I had the SU7300 with the Nvidia, and I was getting well over 5 hours and that was with wifi on and a higher brightness setting.

 

I will have to try out that battery tester and see what I get. I did calibrate the battery when I first got it, charged it all the way then let it run all the way down, so i'm not sure whats up with it.

any other tests/programs i could try in addition to the one mentioned above?

thanks for all these responses!

 

Looking at battery mon right now. battery appears to be discharging appropriately. capacity is 58186mWh. battery life around 5 hours with minimal settings. !!

any other ideas? would HP send me a new battery? do you think it could be some setting on the processor that I can tweak?

 

HP battery check says the battery is "good"... I have literally turned everything down/off that I can think of. I'm still very confused by this. Is there anything in the BIOS that I can change?

Should I try buying a new battery? I'm sure HP would laugh at me if I brought my complaint to them when battery check says it is good. arrrgh I just want what I paid for and what everyone else is getting!

 

Is 58186mWh the designed battery capacity. If it is then something has to be defective somewhere to be getting that kind of battery life. I would check one more time to make sure there are no resource intensive background programs or the processor is not locked at 100% for some reason, even though the latter probably still wouldn't shorten the battery life that much.

If you can't fix the problem I suggest you complain enough to get a refund.

 

Now batterybar is now saying my battery capacity is 58929. Could someone who is running batterybar on their dm3t please post what your battery capacity is? Nothing is running in the background that would explain this drop in battery life.

The other issue is that when this battery is fully charged it stays at 100% for a solid 15 minutes, then when it gets into the 90s it drops a lot faster.

 

Welp, just spent 45 minutes on the phone with HP customer support and havent gotten any further. The rep deleted some "junk files", updated my bios from 03 to 04, but nothing has seemed to help. I knew I was in trouble when the rep said "see, youve got 75mb of 'junk files' on your hard disk, thats almost 1gb." After that I knew it was a crapshoot so I just let him do whatever and nothing got resolved. Basically he told me that 5 hours of battery life is 'good enough' and that any time I use the battery I need to play a movie or something so that it will discharge all the way down to 0% every time.


I had discussed with him that this morning my battery went from 100% to 89% in 15 minutes and all i was doing was IM'ing a friend with nothing else open and screen brightness at 50%. He did not address this issue. Battery check x 2 says it is "good" so that is what they're going on.


I *might* e-mail someone to see if I can get someone to try sending me a new battery. I just cant afford 45 mins at a time on the phone.

 

Find the file C:\Program Files (x86)\Hewlett-Packard\HP Support Framework\Logs\HealthCheckBC.xml. It has all the detailed stats on your battery after you run a HP battery check (obviously remove the x86 if you are running an x86 OS.

 

HealthStatus>Test Passed
TestResult>0
DesignCapacity>5160
FullChargeCapacity>5270
RemainingCapacity>5270
StorageCapacity>100
MaxError>0
CycleCount>0
Temperature>31
TerminalVoltage>12080
Current>1488
DesignVoltage>11100
BatteryManufactureName>DP-SAN51
Status>2
CellVoltage1>4027
CellVoltage2>4025
CellVoltage3>4028
CellVoltage4>0
BatteryACPower>1
BatterySupportedCount>1
SerialNumber>09/18/2009
satId>07421
ManufactureDate>09/18/2009
Source>1
Table>0
SubTable>0
InWarranty>True

Is that cellvoltage4 value of "0" of any significance? Also, does this mean that I only have a 4 cell battery since only 4 CellVoltage lines are showing up? I thought these came with 6-cells?

 

The 0 for cell 4 is normal.. everything looks relatively okay.. was there a warranty id number at the bottom of the file? Also it is probably best if you edit your above post to remove your serial number.

 

yes it did have a warranty id number. what does that mean?